Thursday, June 16, 2016

Microsoft Buys Wand Labs

More movement toward conversations, bot style, AI. Read my Bots tag below for some of our experience in this space. Bots have an element of 'cognitive' in the form of human conversations. Like those that Cortana uses. What elements of intelligence do they represent?

Microsoft buys bot startup Wand Labs to boost its AI chops by Maria DeutscherMany of the tech industry’s biggest players are currently working to address the chatbot trend, but few are investing more into the effort than Microsoft. The company joined the fray early on with Cortana and is now doubling down by acquiring a low-called startup called Wand Labs Inc. that has developed its own virtual assistant for mobile devices. ... The software attempts to spare users the hassle of switching between apps by making it possible to interact with every service on their phones through a centralized chat window. The built-in bot can be instructed to find a restaurant on Yelp, add a song to an iTunes playlist and even change the settings on connected devices like the Nest Thermostat. It’s an appealing value proposition, but Redmond appears to be more interested in the Wand team. Microsoft veep David Ku dedicated half the blog post in which he announced the acquisition to praising founder Vishal Sharma and his 7-person team. ... "